Contentions

Having 9/11 truther Richard Falk retire from his position as “United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories” might have been cause for celebration if it hadn’t been almost inevitable that Falk would simply be replaced by someone no less off the wall. That is what has now happened. Under pressure from the Arab League, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s president Remigiusz Hencze has rejected the candidacy of Georgetown Law lecturer Christina Cerna despite the fact that Cerna had the unanimous endorsement of the UNHRC’s five-member vetting committee. Although initial reports from diplomats suggested that the decision had been made to have Indonesia’s former UN envoy Makarim Wibisono as a replacement for Falk, it now emerges that the position will likely go to the equally dubious Christine Chinkin, one of the authors of the infamous Goldstone report.

What was it that got Christina Cerna disqualified? Well, going by the letters that the Arab League sent to the UNHRC’s president it would seem that what counted against Cerna was that she had no previous record of condemning Israel. Without a resume peppered with pro-Palestinian statements she just couldn’t be considered up to the job. Chinkin, on the other hand, has an impressive record of anti-Israel statements to recommend her.

Falk was always going to be a tough act to follow. This is the man who has accused the Jewish state of “slouching toward nothing less than a Palestinian Holocaust.” Yet, the monitoring group UN Watch has compiled a rogues gallery of some of the other candidates. Many had their money on Falk’s friend and close associate Phyllis Bennis who assisted Falk in compiling a number of his reports, some of which were so pro-Hamas that the Palestinian Authority actually blocked Falk from presenting one of them.

Then there was the application from British lawyer Michael Mansfield, who along with the eminent Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters served as a leading “juror” for the Russell Tribunal, which has been described as a Stalinesque show trial of one-sided evidence against Israel. Mansfield also acted as the attorney defending the Palestinian bombers convicted of the 1994 attack on London’s Israeli embassy and has condemned the killing of Osama bin Laden. Among the other applicants was the already mentioned Makarim Wibisono, who has gone out of his way to talk down Israeli suffering, referring to “the handful of Israelis who have died,” and claimed that Israel uses terrorism as a “flimsy pretext” for its acts of aggression. Then there was former Dutch ambassador to Saudi Arabia Jan Wijenberg who has claimed that the European Union is an instrument of Israeli foreign policy and that a “creeping genocide” is taking place in Gaza.

The woman now most likely to get the job, London School of Economics professor Christine Chinkin, can certainly hold her own among this crowed. Chinkin served as an author of the infamous Goldstone report despite the fact that she was on record accusing Israel of war crimes before the “investigation” even began. Her role in the Goldstone enquiry earned Chinkin a rare rebuke from one of her British legal colleagues Sir Nigel Rodley, then Chairperson of the UN Human Rights Committee, who questioned her impartiality, as did a large group of academics under the umbrella of the respected foreign policy think tank Chatham House. When Justice Richard Goldstone later retracted many of the allegations made against Israel in the report, Chinkin came out in publicly criticizing him.

While at one point it had appeared that Falk’s position would go to Indonesia’s Wibisono, it seems that even he was not hostile enough towards Israel for the tastes of the Arab Group, by all accounts acting in line with the wishes of Ramallah. No less outrageous is the announcement that Falk’s wife, former Turkish government adviser Hilal Elver, is to be appointed to another top UN human rights post. Still, none of this should be considered surprising. Among the UNHRC’s current member states are Algeria, China, Congo, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. The UNHRC was supposed to be the more credible successor to the UN’s Human Rights Commission. That body’s loss of legitimacy may have had something to do with the fact that as of 2003 it was chaired by Libya.

Groups such as UN Watch have been calling on the U.S. to use its position on the UNHRC to step in and put pressure on Remigiusz Hencze so as to prevent the appointments of Chinkin and Elver from going ahead. Whether or not this will happen still remains to be seen.